Color

Man with a Blue Sleeve Titien





I was invited to join a online art magazine today(Art et Peinture), on opening up it's "homepage" I saw a little box at the bottom intitled "le petit dico arstistique" it read: "Couleur primaire : couleur ne pouvant être obtenue par le mélange d'autres couleurs, ce sont le
cyan, le magenta, et le jaune"
I understood something very important to understand art today; we don't know what we are talking about! or at least by ignorance we are mixing everything up.
Cyan is certainly NOT a primary color in painting! Cyan is a printers color and a computer color and in painting the closest we come to Cyan would be Turquoise or Azurite(both being green/blue). Magenta likewise is a printing and computer color (#FF00FF), halfway between red and blue. Both Cyan and Magenta are synthetic.

Since the invention of color printing, and the reproduction of original oil painting by this process, our visual perception has been polluted, now we have the computer to make things even worse! If our perception of form(form refers to the visible elements of a piece of art, independent of their meaning) is polluted, as suggested, then an integral part of the "ouevre" is distorted which could mean that access to the "whole" meaning of said "ouevre" is impossible. I often wonder if this hypothese applies to music and poetry(recorded music or poetry read on the computer). Maybe I am being a purist and should let the end justify the means. I love poetry books, I even smell them, caress them, besides reading them!
It's always with a certain restraint that I look at a Titien painting on the computer, I keep in mind that what I am looking at is a distortion, but it does bring up memories and using these memories I am able to elevate my appreciation a little bit.


'Spiritual America IV' featuring Brooke Shields by US artist Richard Prince in the exposition "Pop Life"

All this brings us to Art today. There is show circulating around entitled " Pop Life" which takes Andy Warhol's provacative claim "Good Business is the Best Art" as it's starting point. I don't intend to discuss business and art right now, maybe, MAYBE, at a later date. What IS pertenent, at this point, is that pop art depends on the "new" color system in it's realization, becoming an intergal part of the "ouevre", and thusly we can "see" the work as a "whole" in magazines,posters even on the computer. We could say that to fully understand contemporary art we must accept new rules. If we attempt to look at art today with the perspective of old we will be lost.


"Marilyn" Andy Warhol(Image may be subject to copyright).